Castlevania Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate
May. 4th, 2014 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe Belmont clan is cursed and shamed, so the Brotherhood sends them on a mission to kill Dracula, lord of the darkness. Again.
At first glance, this reminds me of Super Castlevania, in that it’s essentially a pure action game with some mild puzzle elements and “excuse” rpg elements. It’s very “cinematic” and much more directional than the previous generation of Metroidvania games was; while you can free-roam, there’s much less that’s worth going back for, and the plot is always ahead of you. The real rpg elements are gone; you can find health, magic and heart increases and you “gain levels”, but the latter just unlocks combo attacks. Killing things doesn’t make you stronger. I feel like they really went back to basics on what “Castlevania” was for this reboot, and brought the original NES games up to today’s technology while ignoring the way the series had been progressing.
Once I got a handle on constantly using the R button for everything, I thought the action system was pretty good, and kinda liked the ability to deliver cinematic “finishing moves” on most enemies.
On that topic: I love the auto-save and constant checkpoints, especially during boss battles—you can die on one segment of a boss and not have to re-fight all of the previous segments. (Which is particularly important during quicktime button-pressing segments, which I NEVER got right on the first try. If you miss one or don’t get it in time, you die and are sent back to the beginning of the sequence.) It reminds me of Uncharted more than anything, actually: There are a lot of cheap instant-deaths that you’d never have seen in earlier games (instant-kill spikes and electricity, instant-kill attacks from the bosses…hell, falling too far kills you) with the assumption that the checkpoint wasn’t very far back and you have effectively infinite lives anyway.
The graphics are very nice, though the 3D is there mostly as a little bonus and virtually never figures into gameplay. And this game has a bizarre amount of loading for a cartridge game—every area requires a few seconds, at least. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if there was a tiny disc in the cartridge.
I suspect I’m missing something important by not playing the first Lords of Shadow game—this is apparently an alternate continuity of Castlevania, where Gabriel Belmont (father of Trevor) becomes Dracula. Also, this appears to be the first adventure of Simon Belmont, who’s using his father’s a chain-cross instead of the Vampire Killer (which apparently was destroyed or lost in Lords of Shadow). In the original continuity, Simon’s first adventure was called “Castlevania”, way, way back in the day.
There’s a prologue and three real chapters, starring Simon, Alucard and Trevor, and the last of which is a flashback to 30 years before the previous two. Which means that a boss you “re-fight” in the second chapter appears in his “original” incarnation in the third. Alucard’s level interweaves Simon’s, and unlike previous incarnations of Alucard, he also fights with a chain/whip thing.
There are several full-screen puzzles that you need to do in Alucard’s segment, and you get less XP for if you ask for clues. Of all the hard things in this game, those I was able to get on the first try. (Thanks, Professor Layton, for training my brain!)
Overall: If you were looking for another Aria of Sorrow this definitely isn’t it. But it’s a decent action game and a reasonable old-school Castlevania game.
At first glance, this reminds me of Super Castlevania, in that it’s essentially a pure action game with some mild puzzle elements and “excuse” rpg elements. It’s very “cinematic” and much more directional than the previous generation of Metroidvania games was; while you can free-roam, there’s much less that’s worth going back for, and the plot is always ahead of you. The real rpg elements are gone; you can find health, magic and heart increases and you “gain levels”, but the latter just unlocks combo attacks. Killing things doesn’t make you stronger. I feel like they really went back to basics on what “Castlevania” was for this reboot, and brought the original NES games up to today’s technology while ignoring the way the series had been progressing.
Once I got a handle on constantly using the R button for everything, I thought the action system was pretty good, and kinda liked the ability to deliver cinematic “finishing moves” on most enemies.
On that topic: I love the auto-save and constant checkpoints, especially during boss battles—you can die on one segment of a boss and not have to re-fight all of the previous segments. (Which is particularly important during quicktime button-pressing segments, which I NEVER got right on the first try. If you miss one or don’t get it in time, you die and are sent back to the beginning of the sequence.) It reminds me of Uncharted more than anything, actually: There are a lot of cheap instant-deaths that you’d never have seen in earlier games (instant-kill spikes and electricity, instant-kill attacks from the bosses…hell, falling too far kills you) with the assumption that the checkpoint wasn’t very far back and you have effectively infinite lives anyway.
The graphics are very nice, though the 3D is there mostly as a little bonus and virtually never figures into gameplay. And this game has a bizarre amount of loading for a cartridge game—every area requires a few seconds, at least. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if there was a tiny disc in the cartridge.
I suspect I’m missing something important by not playing the first Lords of Shadow game—this is apparently an alternate continuity of Castlevania, where Gabriel Belmont (father of Trevor) becomes Dracula. Also, this appears to be the first adventure of Simon Belmont, who’s using his father’s a chain-cross instead of the Vampire Killer (which apparently was destroyed or lost in Lords of Shadow). In the original continuity, Simon’s first adventure was called “Castlevania”, way, way back in the day.
There’s a prologue and three real chapters, starring Simon, Alucard and Trevor, and the last of which is a flashback to 30 years before the previous two. Which means that a boss you “re-fight” in the second chapter appears in his “original” incarnation in the third. Alucard’s level interweaves Simon’s, and unlike previous incarnations of Alucard, he also fights with a chain/whip thing.
There are several full-screen puzzles that you need to do in Alucard’s segment, and you get less XP for if you ask for clues. Of all the hard things in this game, those I was able to get on the first try. (Thanks, Professor Layton, for training my brain!)
Overall: If you were looking for another Aria of Sorrow this definitely isn’t it. But it’s a decent action game and a reasonable old-school Castlevania game.
